Oregon 911 Upgrade Follows the Caller’s Phone

Oregon named Lumen Technologies and Intrado on May 27, 2026 to run Next Generation 911 core services for 40 Public Safety Answering Points across all 36 counties. The public still dials 911. The change sits in the maps that decide which center rings.

Those centers already take more than 5,000 calls a day on a system that has run for more than 30 years. Cell towers do not follow county lines, so a phone near a river or a state border can land in the wrong room and wait on a transfer.

Cell Towers Do Not Stop at County Lines

Legacy wireless 911 follows the tower the handset can see, not the patch of ground under the caller. The Federal Communications Commission, citing the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions, puts 12% of wireless 911 calls misrouted on that older method nationwide. Oregon did not publish its own share. The failure mode is the same at a county line in the Willamette Valley or a gorge town staring at a tower across the water.

The Oregon Department of Emergency Management uses Hood River as the teaching case. A caller there can attach to a tower across a river or in the next jurisdiction, so the first voice on the line may work for a different 911 center. That center then has to hand the call off. Seconds go to the transfer, and the caller repeats the address and the problem.

Frank Kuchta, the State 9-1-1 Program Manager, described the replacement as a map lookup, not a tower lookup.

We use what’s called geographic information systems and mapping systems that define specific boundaries to a given jurisdiction. Again, given the intelligence of a smart phone and it’s knowledge of a precise location it would then go through that modern infrastructure and identify the appropriate dispatch center to send the call to

Frank Kuchta, State 9-1-1 Program Manager, Oregon Department of Emergency Management

OEM’s public explainer is blunt about the old design: routing was never built to send a call by detailed geography. Spatial routing is the point of the upgrade, and the smartphone’s own location is the input the old selective routers never had.

The Maps Have to Be Right First

Oregon chose a GIS-first path. Next Generation Core Services, the software that will validate a location and pick a center, only work if road centerlines, address points, and service boundaries line up across county lines. In 2023 the State 9-1-1 Program hired GeoComm to score those layers against National Emergency Number Association rules, then rewrote its GIS and Master Street Address Guide funding policy so local data shops get paid to clean the files.

GIS READY FOR SPATIAL ROUTING

The last gap is the one that still matters. Tabular Automatic Location Information and the GIS roads now agree on 97.6% of records, just under the 98% NENA line for statewide spatial routing. An NG-GTAC committee of local GIS shops has been aligning neighbor datasets so a call that starts in one county does not fall through a seam in the next.

That work is the unglamorous half of “smartphone 911.” A phone can know its coordinates and still get a bad route if the polygon for the 911 center is wrong, or if the road file still thinks a new subdivision lives in the next district. OEM is funding that cleanup from the 911 subaccount, not from a new local levy on the centers themselves.

Oregon Hired Lumen and Intrado to Run the Network

The May 27, 2026 newsroom note set the vendors. OEM’s partnership with Lumen and Intrado covers Next Generation Core Services and the statewide emergency network that will feed all 36 counties. Lumen is CenturyLink Communications, LLC, doing business as Lumen Technology Group. The state’s Department of Administrative Services posted a sole-source notice of intent to award on October 9, 2025, after Lumen filed an NG911 services catalog with the Oregon Public Utility Commission on June 13, 2025. No contract dollar figure was published with that notice.

Kuchta called the pair “an important step forward in strengthening emergency communications infrastructure.” Josh Finke, Lumen’s senior vice president for public sector, said the company would deliver “a secure, resilient network that strengthens emergency response.” Lou Blatt, Intrado’s chief product officer, tied the work to NENA’s i3 architecture, the IP standard that lets a 911 center take more than a voice trunk.

The analog stack is what this replaces: selective routers, TDM trunks, and a location database that grew up with landlines. The new pipe is an Emergency Services IP Network. Voice still rides it first. Text, images, and video are what the same pipe is built to carry later, once the centers and the carriers both speak i3.

Next Generation 9-1-1 (NG9-1-1) will help improve resiliency, interoperability and geospatial call routing to better connect Oregonians with emergency services when every second matters.

Learn more:https://t.co/FQVCpddTX4https://t.co/TAOeAZ5loc pic.twitter.com/PPAhNT8gSZ

— OregonOEM (@OregonOEM) May 28, 2026

Local centers are not writing a check for the core. Shirley Blake, OEM’s public information officer, said the statewide upgrade is paid by the state 911 program. Capt. Sterrin Ward of the Umatilla County Sheriff’s Office, speaking for the Umatilla County Regional Dispatch Center, put the local stake in one line: OEM pays, and the county keeps the better path to the public.

OEM pays for the upgrades. Our benefit is better service to the public through improved emergency communications.

Capt. Sterrin Ward, Umatilla County Sheriff’s Office

That split matters in a state with 40 primary centers and a lot of small rooms. A rural PSAP that cannot float a core-network invoice still gets the same vendor stack Portland uses, as long as its maps and its call-handling gear can take the traffic.

The $1.25 Line Tax Already Pays for This

Oregon is not adding a surcharge for NG911. The work rides on the existing $1.25 emergency communications tax on each phone line or device that can reach 911, including postpaid wireless, landline, and VoIP. Prepaid wireless pays the same $1.25 on each retail top-up. OEM’s 9-1-1 Biennial Report for 2023-25 puts collections at over $80 million a year.

WHERE THE 911 TAX GOES

The rest of what it costs to staff a 911 floor comes from local property taxes. OEM states there is no state general-fund money in 911. The subaccount is the bucket that pays to get a call from a phone to the right center, which is exactly the job NG911 is rewriting. The $1.25 rate is scheduled to sunset in 2030, a date the biennial report flags as the threat to keeping the network current after this build.

Because the fee is already on the bill, the May announcement did not open a tax fight. The political risk is later, when the sunset lands and the IP network still needs a refresh.

Oregon Turned On Statewide E911 in 2000

This is the third big 911 cutover in a generation, and each one taught the next limit. Basic 911 only connected a caller to a center. Enhanced 911 added the number and the address. Wireless broke that model because a handset has no wall jack.

OREGON 911 CUTOVERS

1. January 1, 2000: Statewide Enhanced 911 for wireline is live, among the first such coverages in the country.
2. December 31, 2005: Every primary center can take wireless location data, after OEM and carriers agreed on an Oregon ALI format.
3. August 2016: Several northwest Oregon centers go live with Text-to-911, paid by the same 911 tax, with a web-based interim later offered to any center that wants it.
4. 2023: GeoComm scores statewide 911 GIS; OEM starts replacing the IP network that already ties the 40 centers together for location data and vendor patches.
5. April 1, 2025: The replacement location network is complete and is meant to serve the 40 centers with new services beyond the old ALI path.
6. June 13, 2025: Lumen files its NG911 catalog with the Oregon Public Utility Commission.
7. October 9, 2025: The state posts a sole-source notice of intent to award NG911 services to Lumen.
8. May 27, 2026: OEM announces the Lumen and Intrado partnership for core services.

Text is the tell that “smartphone 911” is not a new idea in Oregon. The biennial report says the state already handles over 13,000 Text-to-911 sessions a year, and OEM’s standing advice is still “call if you can, text if you can’t.” The web-based text path is a workaround. NG911 is meant to drop that traffic onto the same IP network as voice, then open the door to photos and video without a separate kludge for each center.

What a Hood River Caller Gets From the Switch

For the person on the phone, the script does not change. OEM’s companion explainer says people will still call 911 the same way. What changes is the first hop. If the GIS boundaries hold, a gorge-side wireless call should open in the center that actually dispatches there, instead of in a room that has to transfer it.

The same design is what OEM is selling for disasters. Forty centers on one IP network can overflow, back each other up, and keep a call if a single site floods, burns, or loses power. The department also lists better wireless location, redundant paths, and a platform that can take new tools as they show up. Neighboring-state interoperability is on that list because Oregon’s borders are busy: Washington across the Columbia, Idaho on the east, California on the south. A tower that sits over the line is the old problem. A map that both states trust is the new one, and that only works if the other state is on a compatible core.

Remote call taking is already in the lab. OEM opened a State 9-1-1 Lab in 2025 to try gear before it hits a live floor, including workstations that let a telecommunicator answer from somewhere other than the bunker. That is a staffing tool as much as a tech demo. A small center that cannot fill a night shift can still keep a licensed call taker on the state’s network if the call-handling stack and the network both allow it.

That is not a promise that photos of a crash will land on a dispatcher’s screen this season. OEM is rolling the upgrade in phases and says more milestones will come as the project moves. The May note is a vendor lock and a GIS bet, not a go-live date for multimedia.

Federal Rules Put Phone Carriers on a Clock

Oregon is not doing this in a vacuum. The FCC’s two-phase NG911 transition rules took effect on November 25, 2024, with the paperwork pieces enforceable as of March 25, 2025. A 911 authority starts each phase with a valid request. Nationwide wireless, text, interconnected VoIP, and most wireline carriers then have six months. Rural incumbent phone companies and smaller wireless carriers have 12 months. Carriers pay to deliver IP traffic to the state’s delivery points. They do not pay to build Oregon’s ESInet or to upgrade the 40 floors.

THE FEDERAL NG911 CLOCK

• Phase trigger: A 911 authority files a valid request; the clock does not start on a press release.
• Six-month group: Nationwide wireless, covered text, interconnected VoIP, and non-rural wireline must comply per phase.
• Twelve-month group: Rural incumbent local exchange carriers, non-nationwide wireless, and internet-based relay providers get a year.
• Who pays what: Originating providers cover IP conversion and delivery; they do not fund Oregon’s core or the PSAP hardware.

By a July 10, 2026 Federal Register notice, authorities had filed more than 190 Phase 1 requests and one Phase 2 request, covering parts or all of 28 states and more than 2,200 911 centers. Oregon’s own request is not named in that tally. The national money picture is still large. An April 29, 2026 NTIA study put the remaining nationwide NG911 cost estimate at $5.8 billion to $9.27 billion over about seven years, after $4.5 billion already spent since 2018, and 30% to 40% below the 2018 range of $9.5 billion to $12.7 billion.

Oregon is trying to finish its slice with a fee people already pay, on maps local GIS shops have been cleaning since 2023, with two vendors now named for the core. The caller in Hood River will still punch three digits. The test is whether that call opens in the right room on the first ring, and whether the $1.25 tax is still there in 2030 when the new network needs its next turn.